


Puff It into Plumes

by bloo_balloon



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anal Fingering, Breathplay, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Pillow Talk, Smoking, Smut, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Talks of Death, Talks of murder, Under-negotiated Kink, Writing Prompt, but with a twist, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:07:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27515050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloo_balloon/pseuds/bloo_balloon
Summary: Chan peers down at him like he wants to understand, like he wants to dip his hands in Soonyoung’s chest and lay waste to the thorny vines to see if there is something underneath.Ever the enabler, Soonyoung is happy to help him along.
Relationships: Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi/Lee Chan | Dino
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Puff It into Plumes

**Author's Note:**

> Well hello there.
> 
> This is my take on the whole 'You stop aging at [insert legal age here] until you meet your soulmate so you can grow old together. You've been killing your soulmates granting you eternal life.' writing prompt.
> 
> TW: Heavily under negotiated kink ahead, but everything that happens is between two consenting adults. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Spark. 

Inhale. 

Hold it, let it simmer in your lungs. 

Exhale. 

“Pretty ink to cover the filth lying underneath.”

Confusion. Then realization. Then fear. A kaleidoscope of emotions, a storm brewing in his lover’s eyes, a movie happening in slow motion. 

Soonyoung takes another drag, takes Chan’s fear too and breathes it in with the smoke. He hits rewind, presses play. 

There’s no struggle, not of the physical kind at least. Soonyoung claims Chan’s lap like a throne, skin damp with sweat, the insides of his thighs sticky with cum and lube. He wears Chan’s bruises like fine jewelry, cherry red lips parting in a drawn out sigh when Chan’s blunt fingernails rake across his skin, the heel of his palm pressing down on a fresh mark blooming just over the jut of Soonyoung’s hip bone. 

“I thought you liked my tattoos,” comes Chan’s reply, deflated, his eyes downcast. The temptation to blow smoke right in his face is too much and so Soonyoung does, marveling at how Chan gives no indication of being bothered by it. He lifts the cigarette to Chan’s lips and watches as they wrap around the stick with practiced ease. 

“I do like them. Probably more than I should.” Chan in turn blows a lungful of smoke right back at him and reaches for the cigarette again. “Leaves and branches twining around reminders of long dead memories. It’s clever really. Hiding them in plain sight like this. Have they ever gotten you in trouble?”

“At home? It’s South Korea we’re talking about, Soonyoung-ssi,” Chan says, and the sudden formality gives Soonyoung whiplash. _We just had sex_ , he wants to say. _The least you can do is not sound like you’re conducting a business meeting when we’re still hazy from the afterglow._ But Chan isn’t done yet. “Different here, though. My neighbor, Eleonora, thinks they’re pretty. Signor Ermanno from down the street took longer to get used to them. The first few months after I moved here, he thought I was with the Camorra.”

“Not much different then.” Soonyoung traces the petals unfolding over Chan’s left shoulder, vivid orange painted across a canvas of golden, sun-kissed skin. He flicks the ash off the tip of his cigarette and takes one last drag before he stubs it on the wrought iron headboard. “Tiger lilies are my favourites. Can you tell me about that one?”

_That one._ It’s worded to make it sound impersonal, because Soonyoung doesn’t know the individual behind the flower, won’t ever know them as anything but a tally mark etched into Chan’s body, a guilty reminder for when Chan looks at himself in the mirror.

He doesn't pretend to care, not about the person behind the flower and certainly not about the guilt converging over Chan like a blanket of leaden rain clouds. He doesn’t _care_ , but there’s a morbid curiosity that compels him to ask anyway. 

“I don’t—That’s—I think that’s a bad idea.” Trip and fall. Chan scrambles to reinforce the walls Soonyoung had been diligently chipping away at ever since that night on the beach, together under the stars with a bottle of pinot grigio that Chan had been more than happy to share as he opened up to Soonyoung about the recent passing of his soulmate. There were no tears for Rui, the Portuguese expat with curly hair and constellations of freckles dotting his cheeks. Just a description that Soonyoung could’ve sworn he’d already heard somewhere else before, the words falling from Chan’s lips as beautiful as they were hollow. 

It was easy from there. Soonyoung fell into the game of lies as easily as Chan had fallen into his orbit. He showed Chan his unfinished manuscripts, stacks of yellowed paper collecting dust on his cluttered desk, angry scratches and ink stains clear signs of frustration, of road blocks he’d yet to overcome for the sake of his craft. He laughed as Chan skimmed through the words, tongue curling around each consonant, each sound that didn’t quite align with the rules of pitch and intonation of their shared mother tongue. “We’ll have you speak like a native in no time, _ciccio_.”

Carving the truth out of his words came naturally to Soonyoung, like carving out the stones from ripened peaches before feeding them to Chan, chasing the sticky sweetness with his lips moments later. 

Weeks later, when the pieces finally clicked in place, Soonyoung was over the moon, giddy and smug about it too. He’d been right all along, about Chan, about the colours branded into his skin for as long there was life in his body. There were few things Soonyoung liked more than being right—money and sex and flowers, prettier wilted and drained of their colour. 

Chan’s canvas can take more, _will_ take more because guilt is an ugly thing that stays with you. It festers and eats at you from the inside. Stubborn, unwilling to part with its host, like a fucking parasite. 

Soonyoung doesn’t care much for ugly things. Makes it a rule to surround himself with the beautiful wherever in the world he is. And if there’s one thing that the decades—the ones that don’t show on his face, that won’t _ever_ show on his face if he has a say in it—have taught him, it’s that beauty that is owned tastes that much sweeter. 

“You’re a relic of the past,” Chan had joked once, had written it too with clumsy fingers gliding over the keys of Soonyoung’s ancient typewriter —soft on the _S,_ a little sharper on the _L_ that was clunky and uncooperative. Soonyoung had smiled, a silent agreement. 

He’s a relic of the past living in the present and Chan is beautiful, impossibly so. He is beautiful, but he is not _Soonyoung’s_. Not entirely, not yet. 

Pink cheeked and lips bitten raw, sweaty bangs sticking to his forehead because the building hasn’t had functioning A/C since the early 2010s and Soonyoung couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. It’s a good look on Chan. Well, he could do without the fear, the stricken, deer-in-the-headlights expression, but in hindsight, Soonyoung should’ve expected it. 

Douse. 

Spark. 

A hand circling around his wrist, uncertain. 

A thought unscrambling itself from hundreds of others, like a beacon in the dark. 

_Did Chan always have that freesia on the back of his hand?_

The world wobbles, turns on its head.

Soonyoung’s back hits the mattress.

Boom.

Chan peers down at him like he wants to understand, like he wants to dip his hands in Soonyoung’s chest and lay waste to the thorny vines to see if there is something underneath. 

Ever the enabler, Soonyoung tries to help him along. 

He cups Chan’s face with gentle hands, a tender touch that feels entirely too much like the act he puts on every time a new flower blooms on his own body. But Chan isn’t his soulmate and Soonyoung thanks his lucky fucking stars that he isn’t. He doesn’t want Chan to become another wilted flower, another tally mark to go along with the rest, ready to be washed away by the rolling tides of time. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

A splay of fingers cages his neck in a loose circle and instantly Soonyoung’s heart rate skyrockets. Chan’s thumbs ghost across his pulse points, trailing aimless shapes into honey coloured skin. There’s a faint discoloured scar under the line of his jaw and Chan touches it, feeling the difference in texture with the pads of his fingertips. Soonyoung thinks it used to be an iris or a camellia, or something equally as vibrant and ostentatious that as soon as it had appeared, he knew he had to get rid of it quickly. One winter getaway and a faulty masonry heater later, the flower had withered away, leaving behind yet another blemish to add to his ever growing collection. 

“I don’t _need_ to tell you anything either,” Chan says, words sharpened to a point. The slight tremble in his voice isn't lost on Soonyoung, and _oh_ , maybe it hadn’t been fear after all. “Assumptions, Soonyoung-ssi. Four months is an awfully short time of knowing someone.”

Soonyoung pushes off in a sitting position and Chan’s hands let up, albeit hesitantly. He makes for a swift retreat, but Soonyoung latches onto him, threading steady fingers through Chan’s hair to keep him in place. He ducks down to press a reverent kiss to the vibrant tiger lily. 

“You’ve been killing your soulmates,” Soonyoung says into Chan’s shoulder, a faint, breathy whisper ghosting over orange petals, as if _he’s_ the one sharing his deepest, best-kept secrets and not laying Chan’s bare for the world to see. But in a way, he supposes he _is_ giving a piece of himself to Chan in turn. The vines are parting, thorns catching on bloody tissue, groaning in protest as his heart is bared, ready for Chan to pluck it out of his chest if he so desires. “That’s not an assumption.”

The first squeeze bears a thinly veiled threat, light but all encompassing, and Soonyoung lifts his head to accommodate the snug fit of Chan’s fingers, baring his throat with a soft whimper. 

Nervousness gives way to smugness, to hunger, to a flicker of _something_ that flashes across Chan’s face, gone in an instant, and Soonyoung should be scared, should know better than to tickle the sleeping dragon, much too eager to get a reaction—anger, defensiveness, a scorching breath of fire. Just this once though, Soonyoung dips his hand into the flames, goes willingly when Chan pushes him into the mattress. 

“Really?” A challenge if Soonyoung’s ever heard one. 

He grinds up, hears Chan’s shallow intake of breath and his smile turns razor sharp, defiant. “Twenty seven year old Soonyoung would’ve eaten whatever bullshit you’d have spoon fed him and then asked for seconds too,” he swallows around the knot lodged in his throat, around the weight of Chan’s fingers. Not enough. Not yet. “I’m still here, still stuck at twenty seven, but I’m not stupid, _ciccio_.”

Chan raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. He settles between Soonyoung’s open legs like he belongs there, like there’s no place he’d rather be. “Tell me about your first.”

The pressure around his throat borders on uncomfortable now, and if he were a lesser man he’d struggle, he’d huff and pout and remind Chan that he’d asked about the tiger lily _first_. It’s what he’d have done years ago and it's what would no doubt make Chan retreat behind his walls once more, an impenetrable stronghold never to be breached by the likes of Soonyoung ever again. 

And so he grants Chan this small victory.

“Miyoung,” he says, reverent and careful, as if handling that name any other way would bring him insurmountable pain and grief, and maybe once upon a time it did. The wound has had time to heal and years of reapplying clumsy stitches to his heart have left it as no more than an ugly scar, a reminder of the single drop of love that fell on his parched tongue, long ago—sweet as nectar, addictive, yet impermanent. “But that’s not what you want to hear about,” he amends. “She was sick. Passed away from lupus complications a year into our relationship.”

“You’re right. That’s definitely not what I want to hear about,” Chan says, eager but not unkind, and Soonyoung would rather have that over another stale ‘I’m sorry’, over hushed consolations and pity. It’s a tearjerker of a story and if there’s one thing Soonyoung truly feels guilty about, it’s using it time and time again to make himself appear what he is not; hopeless and vulnerable and human. 

And so he tells Chan. About death and greed. About wilted flowers and prickly thorns and inhumanity. 

How it’s almost always easier not to look, but he still forces himself to do it regardless because he needs the reminder, the jolt back to reality. It’s when the rose tinted glasses come off and he’s stripped of all colour again that pain becomes his only companion, the one who knows how to hold him, how to wipe his tears and whisper, soft and haunting. _They die so you can carry on living._

There’s always a word missing right at the end, but Soonyoung can hear it all the same. 

_Forever._

He could hear it while the snowdrop at the base of his spine wept its white petals, loud and clear over the squeaks of the bed as his soulmate sighed his dying breath into existence, the sleeves of his dirty sweatshirt rolled up and the needle still stubbornly sticking out the crook of his arm where Soonyoung left it.

“And you didn’t feel anything?” It’s spoken without accusation, a curious lilt that Soonyoung recognizes as fearful wonderment. A shudder before the one thing Chan still strives to attain, to make tangible and squeeze with greedy fingers, not unlike the way he is squeezing the breath out of Soonyoung. 

Chan must have had some practice with this. To deliver and allow to be delivered to the precipice is an exercise in trust, a delicate balance between lust and folly—sharp edges sanded down by time, time they have not had the luxury of spending a large amount of in each other’s company. 

It comes to him in increments, first the jagged breaths, then the weightlessness, blissful and perfect, like he’s a helium balloon with its string cut loose, ready to take to the sky. His cock twitches between his legs, slowly stirring back to life and it’s a painful decision to make, swatting away at Chan’s wrists when he’s being so good, so eager to please. 

He makes up for it with a bruising kiss that has their teeth clicking, fingers gripping at the short hairs at Chan’s nape like he’s still in danger of floating away, tongue hot against the roof of Chan’s mouth. 

He makes up for it by telling Chan about the blood red gerbera, about how she was both his ruin and his rebirth. “I was supposed to be her lifeline. Cut her free when it became too much.” 

“And you didn’t.” Chan smiles down at him, wild and effervescent. He wraps a hand around Soonyoung’s cock and gives it a few strokes for good measure. “Keep going.”

“You should’ve seen me,” Soonyoung groans, eyes falling shut. He breathes in deep, grounds himself by bunching up the bedsheets in clenched fists. “I made a pretty great trophy husband.”

“I’m sure you did,” Chan muses. “Can I get one more out of you?”

And now Soonyoung does pout. He looks up and Chan’s face is so close he could kiss him. Their breaths mingle, the stench of ash and bad decisions filling the space between their lips, thick and noxious. “Haven’t I said enough for tonight?”

“Do you trust me?”

_No, not really. But I desperately want to._ “You haven’t given me a reason not to.”

“You can be like her,” Chan says simply. He tries to sound detached, but the struggle to snuff out the flame of excitement does not go unnoticed. “The red gerbera.”

Ah, of course. Soonyoung tilts his head up and sinks his teeth into Chan’s lower lip, hard enough to bruise but just shy of piercing the skin. “You mean dead?”

Chan reaches further down between his legs and curls two fingers past Soonyoung’s stretched rim, pushing inside what little of his release hasn’t already leaked out. He adds another drizzle of lube, making the slide easier, wet and so fucking filthy it wrings another groan out of Soonyoung. 

“I suppose you can look at it that way. They do call it _la petite mort._ ”

Oh... _Oh_. 

That’s his cue. Chan’s right hand goes back around his throat, a comfortable, grounding pressure, while the left stays put between his legs, drives him up the wall with slow, deliberate strokes to his insides. Soonyoung inhales greedily, stuttering somewhere in the middle when Chan crooks his fingers up into his prostate. He peers down at Soonyoung expectantly. 

“Won’t get too far if you keep doing that.”

A smile breaks across Chan’s face once again, but all the sharp edges are sanded down. It’s beautiful and wrong and oh so perfect. It’s all Soonyoung’s ever wanted and more. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading and I hope you are having a lovely day wherever you are!
> 
> Leaving feedback is encouraged and highly appreciated.
> 
> Stay safe!


End file.
